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Going back to work with journalism and public relations has been a self discovery journey. One that has taken me back to my roots in a way that I honestly wouldn’t think it would. It took me back to high school and pre-college school, while I was still choosing my profession. It took me back to the very root of my career, that one moment when I decided, against odds and advises, that I wanted to be a journalist. Why did I spend four years at Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, again? [side note: it may call itself a catholic school, but it certainly doesn’t fit the stereotype of a pristine, uptight, conservative school, quite the opposite actually]

It all started with my passion for writing, for literature, and my desire to know things first hand. During school, differently than most of my colleagues, I got more engaged with my scientific initiation study in applied linguistics. They were going after social movements, sociology, philosophy, geography. The thing we had in common was the desire to make the world a better place, each one following one path.

Personally, I think it is ironic that I would start working for a non-profit here in the US, coming from a third world country. But, as soon as I started working at IANTM, I got that deep magic feeling that maybe everything I did in my career was meant to bring me to the following conclusions:

journalism was never a passion per say or a career, but an education to get me somewhere further, to open my mind to new ideas;

writing is definitely a passion and maybe I needed to work for a publishing house to value all my linguistic knowledge and improve my writing skills to boost my confidence in my own life choices;

finally, I needed to work in other areas to experience stuff first hand and reassure myself that I had made the right decision back in the day when I was still an 18 year old student.

I just realized I am portraying myself like the main character in a Bildungsroman, that kind of novel that follows the personal growth of somebody, their paths toward self discovery and their seek for answers about life’s questions. A very empiric approach to life, I must say, because it relies on the fact that experience is the key. And I don’t mean anything by it, except for the fact that maybe I am an empiric person that needs to get her life lessons from experience, not books or blogs or lectures. Something that goes against what I always defended: literature may be the key to understand yourself, life, the cosmos, the universe, well, everything.